No pilot is immune to risk
It would be unthinkable for a flight instructor to send a student pilot on a solo flight without being sure that he or she could perform safely and get out of trouble at the first indication that something was amiss. Unlike the early days of aviation, when the student, instructor, and aircraft designer were sometimes the same person-and mishaps were just as likely caused by glaring design flaws as pilot naivet�-these today there are no fundamental surprises lurking. The landing's not working out? No problem, this student can and will execute a timely go-around. Airspeed getting too low? Not an issue. This student can recognize from sound, yoke pressure, adverse-yaw behavior, and aircraft attitude if the stall realm is approaching. And if by some chance or distraction the student came face to face with an imminent stall, the response would be swift and correct.
So the instructor authorizes the student to solo, and the goal, as this new training stage begins, is to build experience and broaden the safety margin still more. That objective is the foundation of everything that will follow in the pilot's career: at experience levels ordained by regulation, the individual will become eligible for a private pilot certificate, an instrument rating, a commercial pilot certificate, the airline transport pilot (ATP) ticket.
The word time often is substituted for experience when scrutinizing a pilot's eligibility to move up, especially when a pilot logbook is used to measure the progress. X hours of multiengine time will get you an airline or corporate job. So much time in type will satisfy an insurance company that you can handle your new complex aircraft as pilot in command. A designated number of hours (200) logged as a flight instructor entitles you to teach someone else the CFI's trade.
Time and experience become virtually interchangeable concepts when used to express the length and breadth of a pilot's tenure. More convenient than accurate, such comments as "He's low-time" or "She's high-time" send a message about a pilot. When an accident occurs, one of the first questions asked, after "How was the weather?" and "Did an engine fail?" is, "How many hours did the pilot have?" The answer is supposed to provide a clue as to whether the pilot got in over his head.
If that's the case, when is a pilot immunized by experience against the perils faced by others? Never-and we are occasionally reminded of this in tragic fashion.
The airport in Rangeley, Maine, sits at an elevation of 1,825 feet in a mountainous environment, with numerous peaks above 4,000 feet close by. The airport, now bearing the name Steven A. Bean Municipal, has a single, lighted 3,200-foot runway; nonprecision instrument approaches; and runway end identifier lights (REIL) on Runway 32, but no visual approach slope indicator (VASI).
On December 22, 2000, at 5:16 p.m. local time, Steven A. Bean, a 15,500-hour commercial pilot, was approaching his home airport in a Beech King Air 200 with one passenger on board. He had flown two legs earlier in the day, to Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, and had also completed a FAR Part 135 flight check administered by an FAA inspector in a twin-engine Piper Navajo. According to the NTSB, "After departing Portland (Maine), the airplane climbed to an en route altitude of 11,000 feet msl. Approximately 29 miles to the southwest of Rangeley, the pilot was cleared to 6,000 feet msl. At 17 miles southwest, the pilot was cleared for the GPS 'A' approach and was instructed to cross the Rangeley nondirectional beacon (NDB) at 5,800 feet msl. At nine miles, the pilot reported the airport in sight and canceled his IFR clearance. The pilot was instructed to squawk VFR, and a frequency change to 'advisory' was approved. According to radar data, the airplane continued to descend toward the airport on a modified left base until radar contact was lost at 3,300 feet msl." The next day the airplane wreckage was located about 100 feet below the summit of a 3,125-foot mountain.
No weather observation was available for the Rangeley airport, so the NTSB combined a witness's observation with satellite and radar images to create a picture that included a high overcast and light snow showers in the vicinity. A witness familiar with how Bean, who also held a flight instructor certificate for single-engine and multiengine airplanes and was an instrument instructor, would approach the airport after transitioning from IFR to a visual arrival at night, estimated that "the accident site corresponded to a left base for Runway 32, but was approximately two miles wider than normal." The NTSB report also noted that "the up angle from the airport to the accident site was 1.65 degrees." A VASI normally provides a 3-degree glidepath. Some VASI glidepath angles "may be as high as 4.5 degrees to provide obstacle clearance."
Having ruled out mechanical or other causes, the NTSB determined the cause of the accident as "the pilot-in-command's failure to maintain sufficient altitude while maneuvering to land, which resulted in a collision with terrain. Factors in the accident were the dark night, mountainous terrain, snow showers, clouds, and the pilot's decision to cancel his IFR clearance."
About 100 miles to the southwest of Rangeley, and with a view of the same mountain range, Laconia (New Hampshire) Municipal Airport sits on the south shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Until last year, pilots who frequented that airport or visited the fixed-based operation would have encountered Alan Emerson, a commercial pilot and flight instructor with more than 20,000 hours of experience. He was president of Alan Emerson Aviation, as well as the unofficial "Mr. Aviation" in his community.
On September 25, 2002, Wesley Liebeler, 71, a law professor and pilot who had once been counsel to the Warren Commission, sat beside Emerson in an airplane above the lake. Liebeler, a 400-hour instrument-rated private pilot, was receiving dual instruction for his multiengine rating from Emerson in a Piper Twin Comanche. It was Liebeler's second flight in the aircraft, which he was considering buying, according to the NTSB.
Only a preliminary accident report about what happened next was available nearly a year later, as this was being written. The report included vivid eyewitness reports such as this one: "I witnessed what appeared to be an all-white twin-engine plane coming straight down nose first into the water. As it approached, it appeared the pilot tried to bring the nose up. The plane went into the water surface and disappeared out of sight." Another account also conveyed a sense that an attempt was being made to recover from an uncontrolled descent: "I saw what looked like a small plane in a vertical dive...there was no sound that I could hear. As the plane approached it gave me the impression of a radio-controlled model that someone was trying to pull up out of the dive....The angle at impact appeared to be to be less than 45 degrees and perhaps more like 30 degrees off the horizontal." The crash occurred about 25 minutes into the flight, according to the preliminary NTSB document.
Although these accidents involved experienced pilots flying complicated aircraft, they run true to certain statistical profiles, and so they serve to remind all pilots of the importance of knowing the hazards associated with various aspects of flying and recognizing their statistical vulnerability to each. Bean and Emerson held commercial certificates. Liebeler was a private pilot. The AOPA Air Safety Foundation's 2002 Joseph T. Nall Report on accident trends and factors noted that private and commercial pilots were involved in "more than their share of accidents, with private pilots having the highest fatality rate (48.4 percent)."
Night flight raised the probability of fatalities in an accident from 20 percent to 30.4 percent; the "interaction" of night and instrument meteorological conditions doubled that probability. Instructional flying, on the other hand, accounted for 22 percent of all flying in the last Nall Report but only 15.9 percent of all pilot-related accidents in 2001, the year from which the data were harvested.
Nor should you be lulled into concluding that experienced pilots have to be flying complicated aircraft to get into trouble. On December 20, 1999, a retired airline pilot with more than 21,000 flight hours was found dead near the wreckage of his Cessna 152 at his private airstrip in North Stonington, Connecticut. It was uncertain when the accident had occurred at the 1,600-foot-long, 50-foot-wide strip. Investigation did not reveal any pre-impact failures of airframe or engine, although the aircraft had apparently been operated only 26.1 hours in the previous eight years. Official cause: "The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control while landing. A factor in this accident was the pilot's lack of recent flight experience." If that has a familiar ring, it is because that's a common accident cause in general aviation aircraft, regardless of pilot experience level.
These reports remind us that no pilot is immune to risk, regardless of whether there are 15 hours in your logbook or 15,000. But to hedge your exposure to the risks found in the pilot population to which you belong, and in the various kinds of flying that you do, they must be researched and remembered.
Dan Namowitz is an aviation writer and flight instructor. A pilot for 18 years and an instructor for 12, he enjoys learning to fly "anything new and different."
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